Whipping Star

Frank Herbert was never content to write a future in which people merely got into spaceships and had laser-based disagreements. No, Herbert preferred futures with committees, metaphysics, ecological consequences, interspecies confusion, galactic administration, and at least one concept that makes the reader stop and think, “I beg your pardon, the what is being tortured?”

Whipping Star is one of his stranger and more deliciously Herbertian constructions: a space-opera mystery wrapped round a philosophical panic attack. The universe is held together, rather inconveniently, by the Caleban, vast and mysterious beings whose peculiar relationship with space-time allows civilisation to zip about the galaxy through jumpdoors. Nobody really understands them, naturally, because if humanity did understand the foundations of its own transport system it might start behaving with unbecoming caution.

Enter Jorj X. McKie, agent of the Bureau of Sabotage, which is exactly the kind of institution only Herbert could invent with a straight face. In most futures, bureaucracy exists to slow everything down accidentally. Here it has been promoted into a deliberate safeguard: organised obstruction as a civic virtue. McKie’s job is to interfere in the right way, at the right time, before the more enthusiastic forms of power, greed and idiocy manage to collapse society into a decorative crater.

The trouble is that someone is torturing a Caleban. This is bad enough on moral grounds, but also inconvenient because when a Caleban suffers, the entire interstellar network may suffer with it. The galaxy’s infrastructure, it turns out, has feelings, or at least something close enough to feelings that hurting it becomes a very poor transport policy. The villainy is therefore not merely cruel but logistically unsound, which in a Herbert universe may be the greater sin.

What follows is a splendidly odd investigation full of alien communication, power games, legalistic absurdity, philosophical wordplay, lethal wealth, and the sense that everyone involved is trying to negotiate with realities whose instruction manual was written in another dimension by a committee of squid. Herbert delights in systems: political systems, social systems, ecological systems, linguistic systems, and here, cosmic systems that everyone uses daily without grasping the first thing about them. It is rather like modern life, except with more aliens and slightly more honest confusion.

The pleasure of Whipping Star is not that it behaves like standard science fiction. It does not. It is too prickly, too talky, too full of strange conceptual machinery. It is a book in which the furniture of space opera has been rearranged by someone who suspects furniture is a political problem. The jokes are dry, the stakes are huge, the aliens are actually alien, and the bureaucracy may be the only thing standing between civilisation and its own cleverness.

This New English Library paperback is in Good condition, which is appropriate for a book about cosmic infrastructure, deliberate sabotage and the dangers of taking the universe’s hidden plumbing for granted. It has been read, handled and released back into circulation without, as far as Crappy Old Books can tell, causing any jumpdoor failures. A fine little specimen for Herbert completists, lovers of weird SF, and anyone who enjoys their galactic adventures served with metaphysics, administrative friction and a side order of “what on earth did I just read?”

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